Laura Albanese: Mets rookie A.J. Ewing can use Nolan McLean's blueprint to survive first slump
A.J. Ewing of the Mets reacts after a swing during the second inning against the San Diego Padres at Citi Field on Tuesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
There was always going to be a stretch like this, though that was likely little consolation as A.J. Ewing sat in the visitor’s dugout at Rate Field Sunday, contemplating the hellish half hour he had just endured – and possibly, the hellish last two weeks.
With a chance to give the Mets the lead with the game tied and the bases loaded in the ninth, he instead struck out swinging. In the bottom of the inning, he jumped just a hair too soon on the Tristan Peters home run that smacked off the top of the wall to give the White Sox a 2-1 win.
It would have been a spectacular play if he had made it, but when the indignities begin to add up, you don’t think about how improbable that catch would have been – only that it marks another failure at the end of a long string of them. You don’t think that it was Kodai Senga’s 3-and-1 meatball that lost the Mets the game, only that you couldn’t save it.
Ewing is hitting just 6-for-53 in his last 14 games. He’s 21 years old. He’s the centerfielder of the future.
But just like Nolan McLean before him, and Carson Benge at the outset of the season, Ewing will have to navigate the brutality of a sport built on failure. And like them, there’s every reason to believe that he’ll be able to climb out of it.
In truth, he had about one hittable pitch in his ninth-inning at bat against reliever Grant Taylor and simply got beaten by a 98.6-mph heater at the very top of the strike zone. He wore his misery plainly as he trudged back to the dugout.
Speaking last week, after Ewing had struck out three times, interim manager Andy Green underlined the self-perpetuating nature of slumps.
“You don’t get a few hits … and then you feel like you need to make something happen, so you end up out of the strike zone more than you normally are,” he said. “It’s kind of classic in baseball. Everybody goes through it. It’s his first time going through it at the major-league level. I’m confident he’ll come out of it … Part of this game is his ability to control his heartbeat in big situations and he has that ability.”
Organizationally, the Mets have made it a point to identify and foster players who exhibit the mental toughness needed to survive in sub-optimal conditions.
Right now, the template is McLean. Thrown into the fire last year, he made his major-league debut as the team around him swan-dived into oblivion. He rose to the occasion, and when he struggled early on, pitching to a 4.21 ERA over the first two months of the season, he figured that out, too.
Since then, he’s been exactly as advertised, and would be a true rookie of the year candidate if not for his slow start. He’s completed six innings in 11 of his last 12 starts and Sunday allowed no runs on the one hit with four walks and six strikeouts. He has a 1.97 ERA over his last 10 starts.
After Opening Day, Benge’s batting average didn’t crack .200 until May 6. After a two-hit day Sunday – one that included him scoring the tying run on Jared Young’s single in the ninth – he’s hitting .278.
There is every reason to believe Ewing possesses that exact makeup. Andrew Christie, the team’s director of player development, told Newsday last week that identifying that sort of internal resilience has “been a concerted effort for a while.” Ewing was among those identified in that group, which is why the organization promoted him after just 12 games with Triple-A Syracuse.
So as disappointed Ewing may be in his recent returns, this has every chance to be a prime learning experience as the Mets play out the stretch. Stretches like these are inevitable, and surviving them is the key to survival in this game.
The franchise certainly has confidence in him: After playing him in left to get Luis Robert Jr. reps at the only outfield he’s ever played, Green has steadily moved Robert to left – something that occurred again on Sunday. Green earlier this month said that keeping Ewing in center “is important for our future.”
Ewing didn’t magically lose the plate discipline that got him here. And he hasn’t let his slump at the plate affect him defensively. He remains good humored, though he certainly wasn’t smiling Sunday.
But if he doubts his ability to get out of this, he can look to the left of him, at a teammate who did it just fine, and in front of him, to the mound, to another one that became this roster’s benchmark for rookie resilience.
Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.
